09 February 2017

Dear Dogtown: Saint Louis Catholic on Verge of Closure, Needs to Stay Open Another Year

In a surprising development in the local Church, St. James the Greater school, in the Dogtown neighborhood, which had been slated to close at the end of the year, has announced it will remain open next year. Why? From the STLToday story:

Parents with the school and community members ended up
raising more than $250,000 to save the school...

I heard on local news last night that apparently most of this sum came from a single generous, anonymous donor. Hmmm. As I can only assume that this person reads this blog (doesn't everyone?), let me make this announcement:Saint Louis Catholic blog is in danger of closure at the end of the blog year. In order to stay open, I will need a quarter of a million bucks.To donate, just email me at the address on the sidebar with details. Caveat: if you are a Nigerian prince, I cannot put up any security deposit nor give you my SSN.Thank you, generous readers!

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

As usual with this kind of reporting, it raises more questions than it answers.1) Wasn't St. James committed to the joint school effort? How can they back out now, and how will that affect the enrollment of the new school? Sorrows and Joan of Arc can't be happy about this.2) They say they realize the daunting task of continuing to raise recruitment and funds to stay open beyond next year, but at this point it's just basic math. They'll either need to start taking kids from other schools or finding gobs of hidden money to stay open. Where will this money come from? Where will these kids come from?

I wish them well but I hope they haven't just thrown a lot of good money after bad.

Good luck with that! In other St Louis closing news, a Catholic church that was sold to Baptists in 1978, and burnt to the ground last month so is being demolished, is remembered fondly in a letter to the BND today:

Beautiful church: http://www.builtstlouis.net/eaststlouis/east02.htmlFrom the letter to the editor: "Back then the people of St. E thought nothing could ever topple their church or its grand steeple. They thought nothing so steeped in tradition and full of God’s grace could ever perish."

I bet those who built it thought it would last a lot longer than 65 years as a Catholic church and 120 years as an edifice. Especially since the churches it was modeled on were all 1000 years old.

A Day That Will Live in Glory

Pray for the Four Cardinals: Burke, Caffarra, Meiser and Brandmuller

“You are the ones who are happy; you who remain within the Church by your Faith, who hold firmly to the foundations of the Faith which has come down to you from Apostolic Tradition. And if an execrable jealousy has tried to shake it on a number of occasions, it has not succeeded. They are the ones who have broken away from it in the present crisis. No one, ever, will prevail against your Faith, beloved Brothers. And we believe that God will give us our churches back some day."